Obama Fantasies

During the 2008 campaign, Bill Clinton, in a rare moment of honest candor, described Obama’s candidacy as ” the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen”. He was roundly lambasted for that raaaaacist comment, but of course he was 100% correct. That fairytale, or “fantasy” as I like to call it, didn’t develop without a whole lot of assistance from the MSM. Assistance that continues to this day, I should add..

In the past few months, we’ve seen Obama, characterized as our “scandal-free” “adult in the room” President who is “finally going to get tough with his opponents”, and has “no time to feel sorry for himself”.

To strengthen his credibility as the “adult in the room,” President Obama repeatedly asserted his willingness to stand up to liberal activist groups in pursuit of a grand bargain. “I’m prepared to take on significant heat from my party to get something done,” he said, “and I expect the other side should be willing to do the same thing if they mean what they say.”

Yet it is he is who has been the irresponsible spendthrift, procrastinating action on the debt crisis until he could come up with a transparently political plan that won’t work.

It’s hard to keep track of all the tax hikes that President Obama is proposing, but it’s very simple to recognize his main target – the evil, nasty, awful people known as the rich.

Or, as Obama identifies them, the “millionaires and billionaires” who happen to have yearly incomes of more than $200,000.

This sounds like a pretty good scam, at least if you’re a vote-buying politician, but there is one little detail that sometimes gets forgotten. Raising the tax burden is not the same as raising revenue.

That may not matter if you’re trying to win an election by stoking resentment with the politics of hate and envy. But it is a problem if you actually want to collect more money to finance a growing welfare state

At various times throughout his presidency, the MSM has celebrated Obama’s “new, more combative” tone in fighting those intransigent Republicans. Because we all know, Obama’s been such a meek and mild shrinking violet until now.

Now, in full 2012 campaign mode, Obama tries to rally the dubious CBC, by saying, “I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain.” He also told the CBC to “take off your bedroom slippers” and “put on your marching shoes.” And he scolded them to “stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying.”

If there has been a president in my lifetime who has felt more sorry for himself – who has laid the blame for his failures on more people (George W. Bush, the Congressional GOP, the Tea Party, conservative talk radio hosts, millionaires and billionaires) and more things (ATMs, Japanese tsunamis, the Arab Spring, Fox News, Wall Street, et cetera) – I can’t think of who that might be. As the wheels on the Obama presidency come off, as his record of ineptness becomes more indisputable, Obama is becoming more intemperate, more aggrieved, more prickly, and more detached from reality.

What we are seeing is a president attempt to create, almost out of whole cloth, his own character, his own narrative, his own truth. That might work in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel; it works less well in an American presidential campaign.

Well, it may work if enough of his sycophants in the MSM help keep the fantasies alive.